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First post ever on DW
Ever wondered what the first post ever on Dreamwidth was?
Well, this is it. The date might surprise you, though: April 5th, 2008 - long before dreamwidth.org actually appeared on the Web in closed beta form on February 14th, 2009.
Before DW went into closed beta, the servers that were being used for what would eventually become dreamwidth.org were known as "staging servers", and only Mark and Denise had access to them. The code itself, though, was already available to be installed and volunteer development had been progressing for some time, so even though the site itself wasn't open, devs knew more-or-less how it'd look.
Bonus info: Although you may not be aware of it, at first, LiveJournal - which DW is based on - didn't have clusters, and each post was referenced by an arcane URL looking like http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=1 (which points to the first post made on LJ). For posts that were made before clusters existed, they still kept the itemids associated with them, so these URLs still work on LJ.
But DW built on ten years' worth of LJ code and DW already had clusters when it started, so the URLs didn't work. For a while, though, you could still get to the first post in that manner because Mark deliberately twiddled with the DB so that the equivalent URL would work on Dreamwidth too.
It no longer works now, because we've removed support for these old sort of IDs, since we don't have them and never will, and neither will any sites using our code. (We're cleaning up a lot of old and crufty code that never gets used.) So in lieu of that, I thought I'd post about it here, instead. :)
Hope you enjoyed this trip through history!
(Oh, and the first post from closed beta is fun, too.)
Well, this is it. The date might surprise you, though: April 5th, 2008 - long before dreamwidth.org actually appeared on the Web in closed beta form on February 14th, 2009.
Before DW went into closed beta, the servers that were being used for what would eventually become dreamwidth.org were known as "staging servers", and only Mark and Denise had access to them. The code itself, though, was already available to be installed and volunteer development had been progressing for some time, so even though the site itself wasn't open, devs knew more-or-less how it'd look.
Bonus info: Although you may not be aware of it, at first, LiveJournal - which DW is based on - didn't have clusters, and each post was referenced by an arcane URL looking like http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=1 (which points to the first post made on LJ). For posts that were made before clusters existed, they still kept the itemids associated with them, so these URLs still work on LJ.
But DW built on ten years' worth of LJ code and DW already had clusters when it started, so the URLs didn't work. For a while, though, you could still get to the first post in that manner because Mark deliberately twiddled with the DB so that the equivalent URL would work on Dreamwidth too.
It no longer works now, because we've removed support for these old sort of IDs, since we don't have them and never will, and neither will any sites using our code. (We're cleaning up a lot of old and crufty code that never gets used.) So in lieu of that, I thought I'd post about it here, instead. :)
Hope you enjoyed this trip through history!
(Oh, and the first post from closed beta is fun, too.)
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These numbers are actually related to the number of posts in the journal, but it isn't a straight number. Instead, when you post a new entry, the number you get in the URL is the number of that post in your journal multipled by 256, and then a random number from 0-255 is added to it. This stops people from just going to /1.html to find the first post.
This means that you can find out the number of the post in the journal by dividing the number by 256, and discarding the decimal portion. So 385 / 256 = 1.504 or so, and then discarding the decimal portion gives you the post number in that journal: 1.
In the same way, your latest post has a number of 156389, which makes it the 610th post in your journal. (156389 / 256 = 610.895.) Deleted entry IDs aren't reused, which explains why your profile only says you have 608 entries - you must have deleted two since you started here.
Does that explain things?
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I knew on that LJ you could go to talkread.bml and keep incrementing the itemid to view old public posts in the system, but it never worked on DW (even when changing to the new URL scheme and starting at someone's journal). I guess it wouldn't work anyway, for reasons you mentioned in the post but I was always curious why you couldn't just go 1.html, 2.html, etc. to view someone's first few public posts.
I guess my next question is, then, why would you want to prevent this behavior? Assuming that the posts were public anyway. Just wanting to discourage people from fiddling around with URLs?
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I thought it was fixed on DW, but it turns out not to be, so I've edited most of this comment out and will post it as a bug.
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